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Valuevine is now Venuelabs!

In 2009, we launched Valuevine to help franchises reach out to and engage their customers using social media. We did some great work and learned a lot along the way. A question a lot of our customers and prospects had is, “how do we best measure ROI?”

At the same time, the iPhone was exploding in popularity and ushering in the age of the smartphone. Apple’s iTunes App Store made it easy for third-party companies to build software for the iPhone. Google’s Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and others now have app stores too. Some of the most popular apps – Angry Birds aside – have been social media and networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and many others that allow users to “check in” at locations and tell their friends about their experiences.

The explosion of location-based data has been transformative for brands with storefronts. Marketers who have been effectively flying blind to local feedback now have the means to target marketing programs much more efficiently.

We decided we had to make this data available for our customers in a way that was easily understandable, and just as important, something they could use to weigh the ROI of marketing campaigns.

We started by adding a “social inbox” to our marketing product. This was a stream of tweets, and check-ins, etc. for our customers to sort through. From here, we launched Valuevine Connect in February 2011. This puts location-based data from places like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Foursquare and 20+ others into one place and in a format that allows out clients to track and measure consumer activity and sentiment.

The goal of this offering is to allow our customers to stay informed and be proactive about what consumers are saying about their experiences at local storefronts.

What we found when we introduced our location intelligence offering was quite interesting:

Recent research shows us brands are missing 70 percent of the stream of site-specific content online. Because of this, we have experienced massive growth in the storefront intelligence product while the social media marketing offering has grown more slowly.

Small companies have to make tough decisions about what to focus on and what to walk away from. In our case, it very rapidly became clear what our focus needed to be.

Starting today, we are refocusing our services around what we see as a huge opportunity to help brands know what customers are saying at their storefronts.

It is an area that simply isn’t being addressed in the market. There are a few social media marketing/monitoring companies that claim comprehensiveness, but they simply don’t provide information by storefront. Brands have a false sense of security, thinking they have a full view of consumer sentiment. We can fix that.

Venuelabs connects brands to local customers in a way that is simply not possible through other means.

We are changing our name to more closely align with this new focus. Moving forward, we will be known as Venuelabs. We will continue to add to and improve our product offering for brands with storefronts.

Stay tuned – over the next few months we will be announcing some very exciting innovations that we have been working on.

Our prospective customers naturally gravitated toward local monitoring and analytics as a first priority over location-based social media marketing.

The company experienced massive, exponential growth in the storefront intelligence product while the social media marketing offering grew more slowly.

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Small companies have to make tough decisions about what to focus on and what to walk away from. In our case, it became clear in a hurry what our focus needed to be.

Starting today.

We are refocusing the company around what we see as a huge opportunity to help brands know what customers are thinking at their local storefronts.

It’s an area that simply isn’t being addressed in the market. There are a few social media marketing / monitoring companies who claim comprehensiveness, but they simply don’t provide information by storefront. Brands have a false sense of security, thinking they have a full view of consumer sentiment. We can fix that.

Venuelabs connects brands to local customers in a way that is simply not possible through other means.
We are changing our name to more closely align with this new focus. Moving forward, we will be known as Venuelabs. We will continue to add to and improve our product offering for brands with storefronts.

One more change we are including with the launch of our new brand is that any brand can create a Venuelabs account online starting today.

Stay tuned – over the next few months we will be announcing some very cool innovations that we have been working on.

Recent Posts

Brand Testimonials

Albertsons

“With thousands of local channels for our consumers to tap into in terms of expressing their pleasure, or displeasure, with our store, staff, or brand, we needed an automated, scalable and accurate solution. Venuelabs has not only provided the visibility into these channels, but the platform we were seeking to engage with customers and recognize exceptional employees.”

Karl Meinhardt- VP of Digital Marketing

American Golf

“Venuelabs has changed the game for us, allowing us to see intimately into the experience of our customers at each of our nearly 100 courses and properties. Local customer satisfaction cannot be managed with ‘one size fits all.’ Venuelabs insights helped our team understand the opportunity to exceed customer expectations on a course-by-course basis.”

Tyler Pringle- Director of Digital and Social

Original Joe’s

“Venuelabs is instrumental in helping us understand and grow our local customer communities for each of our restaurants, on sites like Instagram and Foursquare. Not only do we leverage Venuelabs for our monthly marketing planning, but we also measure the local impact of our campaigns on a location-by-location basis.”

Jeff Humphreys- Manager of Digital & Social

Sunburst Hospitality

“We rely heavily on Venuelabs to keep up with the many websites where guests can post just about anything about our hotels. Neither I, nor the hotels, have the time to gather all of this data; Venuelabs is an excellent resource and key to helping our hotels operate to the best of their abilities. “